You're definitely right there, but most of those announcements are for crap projects, and I think it's become standard for that section to be a spam-infested, zero-value trap for shitposters and paid shills.  The gambling section(s) shouldn't be that way.

I'm not a gambler and generally don't visit either of the gambling-related sections except for when I'm doing post history reviews for members on request.  When I've done that I've noticed that I'm visiting threads that are hundreds of pages long sometimes.  It's almost like there are multiple Wall Observer threads there!  But like OP mentioned, there are so many campaigns that require posts in the gambling section that it's inevitable that threads with so many pages are going to attract the worst posters, as they know nobody is going to read anything they write.

Not sure if any changes are going to be made, but I'd certainly support everything OP is proposing, especially having to lock threads after a certain period of time.  OTOH, I have a feeling that those shitposters in campaigns will invariably find a way to get around whatever restrictions/changes that are imposed, since they still have to meet their post quota (and you know nothing's going to stop them from doing that).

I don't know if that's a shitpost made for sheer length or what, but those things mentioned in it aren't exactly hidden gems.  People have been buying dividend stocks and REITs for many years, and anyone with a retirement fund probably owns both of them.

I'm not sure when things are going to markedly improve for bitcoin, but I'm somewhat reassured that the price is still above $20k.  Realistically that could be a dead-cat bounce, but I'm hoping that it isn't.  As far as the economy goes, though....whoo.  I've had a feeling in my gut that a huge crash was coming for years now.  I didn't predict that it would be inflation that accompanied it, but I sort of figured there would be some interest rate hike that kicked it off, and it looks like that was true.

I happened to have Youtube on autoplay and that video came up, and I ended up listening to it.  I don't agree with the first few of his "pains", in particular that wash trades are allowed and that there are so many unregulated exchanges.  Well, it's a 'sort-of' disagreement on that second one, because I'm not a fan of regulation in general as governments tend to fuck things up more than they actually help markets, and I like the fact that there are so many crypto exchanges.  If they all had to submit to whatever governments would impose on them, I'm sure half the altcoin market wouldn't even be listed on exchanges, and that would be a bad thing IMO.

By the way, these are the kinds of statements that I think might put Saylor in hot water if his shareholders decide he's made a bad decision by having MSTR invest so heavily in bitcoin.  The SEC might even decide that he's trying to hype up assets that his company owns, to the extent that it runs afoul of what's legal.  I'm just thinking aloud here, but I just get the feeling that he really ought to stay silent about his love of bitcoin for his company's sake, if not his own.

That was kind of a hedge-y statement, and I think I agree that she might not have meant exactly two years.  Considering that inflation has only recently begun to spike, I was thinking that things might get a hell of a lot worse before they get better.  What's inflation at in the US right now, 8% or something like that?  That didn't come about because of something that happened just recently; it is what it is because of the rampant money printing, all the stimulus checks, and who knows what else--but it's been a long time coming.

As far as whether the Fed has the power to reverse inflation and get it to 2%, my answer would be yes.  That's part of the reason they exist, and it's why they're so careful about adjusting interest rates--they have tremendous power over the economy. 

The real question on my mind is how they're going to decrease inflation without crashing the stock market (and perhaps crypto as well).  I'm not sure it can be done.

Yeah well, that's what happens to social media sites when they're essentially controlled by their advertisers.  One could have predicted how they'd turned out before they even came into existence, because the same thing happened with newspapers, television, and everything else that's under corporate control.

Anyway, all of the speech restriction is the least of my concerns as far as Facebook is concerned; the reason I don't have a FB account is because of their horrendous privacy-violating policies.  I don't know how anyone could upload personal stuff to that site, but millions of people do, and it's baffling to me.

Where's Elon Musk and his big talk when you need him, eh?

This forum has people from all over the world, of every religion and of no religion, and it's a better forum because of it (despite when members who can't write English try to do so for bounties/campaigns, but that's another story).  I've got nothing against Arabs myself, and simply because that post got merited wouldn't change my views one iota.  I've seen posts get merit for far less substantial sentiments than that.

Bro, you don't need to defend your actions, believe me.  OP is either trolling or really just hates Arabs; I'm not seeing much support for his arguments here, so you needn't worry.

I think it was more than that, but I'm 99.9% sure it was at least that, which is nutty to think about.

Great job, OP!!  This was exactly what I was looking for when I made that post and I was hoping someone would see my question and crunch the numbers.  It couldn't have been easy to do, since the data isn't exactly readily available in one place.  I very much appreciate the effort.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the absolute first sig campaign was earlier than 2013.  I remember browsing very old posts, and I stumbled across the thread where the idea to rent out signature space for advertising was floated, and I could swear it was 2011 or thereabouts.  Either way, nine years' worth of data are more than enough to satisfy my curiosity.

I knew there was a drop-off from 2018 to 2020, though obviously I didn't have it represented in graph form.  You could just tell from the Services section that sig campaigns were in danger of dying off, because there weren't as many new ones being started.

Again, props to OP for compiling the charts.

I read his thread and got the same impression from it.  Escrow and the $6.50 up front aside, the fact that he only gives details of the offer via PM is totally sketchy, and this comment from a member who apparently did get the details doesn't put my mind at ease that this isn't something illegal or dangerous to whoever goes along with it:


So OP, it's no wonder you got tagged.  Unless you reveal what it is you're doing, the fact that people have to enter their bank info into some kind of app is going to make people suspicious.  Maybe if you get people who did whatever it is you're trying to get them to do to report back that they got paid and weren't at risk of identity theft or some such thing, your red trust could be removed--but that's up to yahoo62278 and whoever else decides to tag you.

I just noticed your post, as I hadn't visited this thread in some time.  So you're the club leader now?  Damn, yo.  You deserve all the merits you've earned, but you've set such a high bar for anybody looking to dethrone the merit king.  Compared to you my merit count is shit!

I'll be back if and when my merit count hits 6666.  Might be a year or two, but that's my next milestone.

Edit:

Thank you both, I appreciate it.  I try to do my best as a merit source.  It's not a paid position, but I believe in the system as a mechanism to curb shitposting and account farming and I believe it's helped significantly since 2018.  Helping worthy members (like both of you) to rank up is rewarding to me, and the gestures of gratitude are just a bonus. 

But yeah, it'll be quite some time before I hit 10,000 merits.  The merit system has been around for over 4 years now if I've got my math right, and I'm just over halfway there.  That's OK, though.  I wouldn't mind if I never received another merit, ever.

Right, but remember that the $1500/week is for 5 individuals who aren't a family and presumably wouldn't be pooling their money together for anything aside from house expenses.  But your point about the cost of living in Indonesia is well-taken, and I appreciate you relaying your experience with what sounds like living off the proceeds of a sig campaign.  I know there have to be quite a few members here who do just that, but I'll be damned if I know who they are.

Somehow I doubt that--but then again I know absolutely nothing about Nepal.  I'd like to, though.  Do we have anybody here who either lives there or who's been there who could attest to what it's like?  And man, I wouldn't even be able to locate Nepal on a map without Googling it first (lol).

If you think you disagree with enough of someone's feedbacks, you ought to exclude them with no question.  That goes for you, me, and everyone else.  You said yourself that you agree with a lot the trust Timelord2067 has left in the past, so I'd say if it hasn't reached the tipping point for you yet, don't exclude him.

There have been DT members who've left inappropriate negs for others in the past, and I didn't exclude them from my trust list.  There has to be some leeway IMO, because nobody's perfect.  But let's take JollyGood as an example: I didn't exclude him until he made a habit out of having a hairpin trigger with the red paint spray gun.  Otherwise his sent feedback is/was spot-on.

Timelord2067 has had questionable judgement ever since I became aware of him years ago, so I'm not going to be excluding him--nor am I going to argue that others shouldn't, though, because I would certainly understand why he'd be deserving of that.

Well, to each his own, but personally I don't care what beliefs a trade counterparty holds as long as they don't lead me to think that the person can't be trusted.  Being homophobic/racist/sexist shouldn't be a problem on a forum like this, since people generally don't know enough about each other to be prejudiced.  And someone can be prejudiced against a group of people and still carry out an honest deal with someone in that group, too.  It happens all the time in the real world.

I wouldn't blame anybody for not meriting newbies, especially since so many of them stick to the bounty section and posts by many of them who make posts in other sections just plain suck.  Sounds harsh, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who's observed that phenomenon.

That said, I could swear I merited more than one newbie last month, and I know I've said that in previous months, but I definitely try to help out members with no merits when I see decent posts made by them.  Ah well, thanks for the data dump and I'll try to improve my ranking for next month.

Well, he certainly doesn't seem to have any kind of filter from his brain to his mouth when it comes to his love of bitcoin--and I'm not so sure it's a great idea for him to be extolling the virtues of bitcoin on Twitter, Youtube, and wherever else considering how large a position MSTR has in it.  The SEC and/or MSTR's shareholders might eventually put him under the microscope for doing that.  I have no idea if he's doing anything illegal by doing that, but I'll bet that his shareholders are pretty pissed right now.

As I've said before, it's great that Saylor is such a big advocate of bitcoin....but he runs a publicly traded company and seems to be using every spare dollar (and more) the company earns to buy it.  I'm sure nobody was complaining when bitcoin was rising, but now?  Yeah, I'm just waiting until there's a class action lawsuit brought against MSTR for something related to bitcoin.

When I woke up today and saw that bitcoin was under $19k, the first thing I thought of was MSTR and how much of a hit they're going to take.  Yikes.

You might want to move this to the Speculation section, as it's more appropriate there.

As far as your prediction goes....people always start calling doomsday when prices sink and moonshot when they're going up.  Sometimes they're right, sometimes not.  Things are looking pretty dire at the moment, so who knows?  I certainly didn't think we'd be seeing bitcoin dip below $20k this year, but c'mon--this is bitcoin we're talking about.  Crazy-ass price swings have always been a part of the game.

Stay optimistic, all of you who are panicking. 

I've been here since 2015, and back then it seemed like there were tons of bitcoin-paying signature campaigns, and I'm not sure if there were even bounties back then because it was before the ICO craziness of 2017-18 (if someone could clue me in on that, I'd appreciate it).  Yobit was running their first campaign, Secondstrade had theirs running, and pretty much anyone could get in to either of those.  That being the case, you can imagine how many crap posts were being made--but that's for a different thread.

After the ICO market crashed and bitcoin tanked in 2018 it seemed like campaigns were drying up, and things got very competitive--and that's exactly what you described, where even older members were applying for low-paying ones and sometimes not even getting in.  Right now I don't even have a sense of how many are running because I have signatures on ignore and I don't visit the Services section.  If I'm right, most aren't paying that much nowadays, because if Chipmixer pays the most at $300/week, I think the rates were much higher back in the day.

Then there must be a language barrier between us, because I stated it a few times in this thread (though you probably haven't read everything; the thread is getting longer by the day).  Anyway, nobody has yet to reach out to me to suggest they'd be my housemate, so for right now it remains simply a fantasy.  I'd like to make it a reality, but there are a lot of barriers to a person moving to a different country without a real job awaiting them there or with little savings, both of which apply to me. 

Indonesia, eh?  It's usually hot there, isn't it?  How's the humidity?

That was kind of you, and I always like seeing members I don't recognize giving away their merits to help others (though whether OP should've earned a merit here is iffy to me, but whatever).  Props to you for that.

OP, I assume you tried to send a PM to somebody, which you should have been able to do.  What kind of message did you get when it didn't go through?

Ugh, I read your post after writing the above.  He definitely shouldn't have gotten any merits here, but I think PX-Z had good intentions.  Vifzor, if you're working toward earning merits you might want to step up the quality of your posts by a factor of 100 at least.  You don't want to end up on the ignore lists of merit sources, and creating this thread isn't helping you.

I don't think that exclusive club is all about what you think it is--and I do hope you don't think our coven is sending merits back and forth to each other, because that isn't the case at all.  If there was a group of members doing that, I'm not even sure it'd be breaking any rules (though I have no doubt that they'd be publicly called out for merit abuse, and rightfully so).

I'm one of those members who thinks the self-congratulatory threads have an icky feeling to them at best, and some of them are definite attempts to earn merits.  However, I don't think anyone ought to be prevented from making a thread like that if they want to.

With respect to whether OP's post was a merit phishing expedition, that would depend on what was written I think. 

Jesus, that could be a hundred page thread of its own.  The forum right now is tame in comparison to, say, 2018-19, when it was nonstop mudslinging from multiple cliques and one-on-one matches as well.  Some people are quick to accuse others of wrongdoing, but it's kind of always been that way since I've been here.  I knew before I registered that this was no forum for pussies.

99% of what people would consider merit phishing threads are started by members who haven't been here long, are already advertising something in their signature or avatar space, and just come across as wanting merits so they can rank up and make more money.  A lot of the time, they write very long posts with little substance and with much repetition, probably thinking that members with merits to give will be impressed by the sheer length of their post. 

As the saying goes, it's like pornography:  it's hard to define precisely but you know it when you see it.

Or even aging, depending on how long you plan on keeping your coins in cold storage.  Believe me, memory doesn't get better with age--and you do make a good point about things that can go horribly wrong.  I'd never rely on a human brain in lieu of something like a metal plate with a seed phrase stamped or engraved onto it.

Has anyone read Bitcoin Billionaires by Ben Mezrich?  It's a great read, and it describes in detail how the Winklevoss twins stored the private keys to their first big bitcoin purchase.  It involved laptops with wifi adapters removed, the subsequent smashing of the laptops with a sledgehammer, and the twins traveling to several banks spread across the US to put separate pieces of the keys into safety deposit boxes.  They were kind of maniacal about the security of their bitcoin, and I'd say they were smart about it too. 

That doesn't help the rest of us who don't have the resources to do all of the things the twins did, though.  I'd stick with my suggestion above and use something metal to stamp/etch/engrave whatever you have for a private key on.  At the very least write it down on paper and keep that paper secure.

Ambitious as hell, too, I'd say.  Kind of reminds me of Jeff Bezos or whoever's been running Google for the past 10 years, because with all the irons Binance has in the fire it looks like he's trying to build an empire.  I'd bet most people are unaware of what Binance is right now (at least those not into crypto), but if they continue at this rate they might be a household name in a few years.  Crazy.

Lol, you must have a lot of it then.  As for me, there's no way I'd want to spend bitcoin on a taxi ride--assuming I rode in taxis, which I don't--when I could spend the rapidly-inflating dollars in my pocket instead.  True, bitcoin just took a big hit compared to fiat, but I'm confident that the long-term trend is upward for bitcoin and the opposite for fiat.

But hey, to each his own.  Bitcoin was created to be used as money, so I've got no gripe with anyone who wants to spend it.

Not being as tech-savvy as the rest of y'all, that wasn't my main problem with this.  I don't like biometric data being in the hands of big tech companies, because I don't trust who they're going to share that data with.  In fact, I don't trust big tech companies as a general principle (though unfortunately I'm in an abusive relationship with them that I can't seem to get out of).

The article cites the fact that many people are using passwords like "123456" and so forth.  I'm not sure if that's an argument for the implementation of biometric "passwords" as much as it is for educating people on using stronger passwords and just being more mindful of their online security in general.  But I swear, if this becomes the industry standard, you'll be seeing me in 2040 using a smartphone from 2022--and hopefully living in my campaign farm castle in utopia somewhere where the weather is nice and the women abound.  Lol.